Digital Financial Reporting

28msec was kind enough to simplify the process of working with the rendering examples I provided in a series of blog posts (here, here, and here).

Before, I had to use escape characters in the URLs.  That has changed, you no longer need to do that so the URLs are more straight forward.

Because they are going to abandon the prior format in a week or so, I will provide a new summary of URLs here.  Also, although the examples I provided were for the primary financial statement information, realize that this process works for disclousres also.  And so, I will start there; with disclosures:

• Disclosures
  • Compare inventory components of Apple
  • Compare long-lived assets of Apple
• Compare information across entities (net income breakdown)
  • For DOW 30
  • For Fortune 100
  • For S&P 500 (takes 20 seconds)
  • For Russell 1000 (takes 40 seconds)
• Compare various different sets of information across entities (done for DOW 30, but works for all groups of entities, try chaning DOW30 to FORTUNE100, SP500 or RUSSELL1000)
  • General information
  • Balance sheet summary (classified)
  • Income statement summary (multi-step)
  • Net income (loss) breakdown
  • Comprehensive income (loss) summary
  • Comprehensive income (loss) breakdown
  • Cash flow statement summary
  • Cash flow breakdown (continuing and discontinued operations)
  • Key financial ratios
• Compare various different sets of information across PERIODS for the same entity (all these are for 3M, try changing the CIK number parameter to get other entities)
  • General information of 3M across time
  • Balance sheet summary information across time
  • Income statement summary information across time
  • Comprehensive income summary information across time (notice how they had an error in 2011, fixed the error, and the information has been consistent since then)
  • Cash flow statement summary information across time
  • Key financial ratios summary information across time
• Compare as reported information for an entity (compares entire financial statement as the entity reported the statement, American Express is shown)
  • Balance sheet
  • Income statement (this has some issues, showing too many periods)
  • Cash flow statement (this has some issues, not showing ending balance of cash)

Recognize while you can get all this information in a HTML form readable by humans (as is shown above because it is easier to read), all this information is also available in machine-readable XML, CSV, Excel, HTML, and JSON.

Here are examples of the fact tables for the general information for the DOW 30 in various formats which removes all the rendering related artifacts which makes using the information more flexible:

• HTML
• CSV
• Excel
• XML
• JSON

As more and more business professionals make use of this information, pressure to improve the quality of this information will likely increase. Information like that shown above will make it easier for business professionals to understand the reported information.